


Blue Pencils and Bravery

by geekprincess26



Series: Blue Pencils [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - School, Awkward Shyness, F/M, Secret Admirer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 01:51:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9635600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geekprincess26/pseuds/geekprincess26
Summary: Social pariah Jon Snow is brave.  Socially brilliant Sansa Stark is not.  When he takes the punishment for her cowardice, she decides to make up for it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day 8 of Jon x Sansa Fanfiction’s 15 Days of Valentine’s challenge.

The summer Sansa Stark turned twelve, the Manderlys moved out of the house across the street, and a woman and a boy moved into it. From what Sansa could gather of her parents’ dinner table conversation – which was admittedly not much, since Arya and the boys always did their utmost to ensure that their parents never had any dinner table conversation at all – Lyanna Snow had just gotten divorced and been awarded sole custody of Jon, her twelve-year-old son.

 

Sansa did not see much of either of her new neighbors until her first day of sixth grade, when she found she had been assigned to the same homeroom at Casterly Rock Preparatory School as Jon had. Even then, she did not notice him much because he rarely spoke to anyone. He blushed red as a beet when Mrs. Mormont introduced him to the other students on the first day of classes, an action he repeated the next day when Sansa politely offered him the blue pencil he had dropped on the hallway floor. He muttered a quiet “thank you,” pushed a lock of his curly brown hair behind his ear, and placed the pencil right next to it before heading back down the hall. Sansa cringed when she saw him do it, for she knew that many of the other students would laugh at him. And laugh they did.

 

Jon got laughed at quite a bit during the first few months of the school year, and not only because he always had a pencil tucked behind his right ear – and a blue pencil at that, not even a normal yellow one.   His glasses were too big, his uniform tie was always crooked, he was no good at sports, and he often tripped over his own shoes. It would have been hard enough for him even without those flaws to fit in with a group of students who, with only a few exceptions, had known each other since kindergarten; but with them it was nearly impossible. Moreover, it quickly became common knowledge among students and teachers alike that Lyanna Snow could only afford to send her son to Casterly Rock because of a structured settlement she had received due to her injuries in a car crash a couple of years ago. The other students’ parents, Sansa’s among them, needed no such financial assistance, and that was another strike against poor Jon. Sansa sometimes felt sorry for him, but that was only when she bothered to remember him, and Jon Snow was not particularly memorable. Not, that is, until one day near the end of the school year, when the sixth graders were sharing recess with the second graders and Theon Greyjoy began picking on Sansa’s brother Bran. Bran, a shy boy and rather short for the age of seven, wanted to use the spiral slide at the southeast corner of the playground, but Theon kept jumping onto the second rung of the slide’s ladder just as poor Bran had managed to clamber onto the first one.

 

Sansa, who had been talking with some of her friends, did not notice Bran’s plight right away, but when she heard her brother begin to cry, she whipped her head around to spot the source of the trouble. Without thinking, she dashed over to the slide, pulled Bran into her arms, and shoved Theon against the ladder.

 

“You – you flying jerk, Theon!” she hollered, remembering just in time not to use any stronger language in front of the second graders. “Back off him!”

 

Theon only smirked. “Geez, Stark, you’ve got a temper, haven’t you? Starting fights now? Huh?” He rubbed his right arm dramatically. “I should really let one of the teachers know – they can’t have someone with your anger problems running around – ”

 

Sansa paled. She dreaded getting into any kind of trouble, whether at school or anywhere else. And now, she realized, all of her friends were staring at her like she was crazy, and so was Joffrey Baratheon, the most handsome boy in the class, and she really did not want to look bad in front of any of them. Then she felt Theon’s hand grab her wrist.

 

“Come on, little girl, off to the teacher with you,” he said in a singsong voice. Sansa pulled at him but failed to dislodge his grasp.

 

All of a sudden, Theon dropped her arm, because all of a sudden, Jon Snow was tackling him to the ground.

 

“Leave her alone, Greyjoy!” he shouted. Sansa gasped. She had never heard Jon raise his voice, and even when he had been embarrassed she had never seen him this red in the face. She hastily pulled Bran out of the tussling boys’ way, and not long after, Mr. Cassel, the gym teacher, arrived to separate the two of them.

 

“What in blazes started this?” he said. All of a sudden, the entire schoolyard had fallen silent. Sansa looked around at her friends, huddled together about ten feet away, and then at Joffrey Baratheon, the most handsome boy in the grade, who had been talking with his own friends just next to the slide and had surely seen everything, but nobody would say anything. Finally, Theon broke the silence.

  
“Jon attacked me, Mr. Cassel,” he said. Sansa’s jaw dropped, but Mr. Cassel was not looking at her. He was looking at Joffrey Baratheon.

 

“Is this true?” he asked, and Joffrey, to Sansa’s dismay, replied that it was. She was just as dismayed when Jeyne Poole and Margaery Tyrell and everybody else agreed. Mr. Cassel should be told the truth, although then Sansa would get into real trouble for shoving Theon, and she so hated getting in trouble, and her parents would be so ashamed of her. She was still trying to decide what to do when she caught Jon Snow looking at her earnestly as though sure she, at least, would tell Mr. Cassel what had really happened. She could not meet his gaze, though, so she hung her head instead.

 

“It’s true, Mr. Cassel.” Sansa, unable to believe her ears, whipped her gaze upward to see Jon looking the teacher in the eyes. “I did tackle Theon. It’s my fault.”

 

Sansa hung her head lower if possible. She knew she should say something now, but she could not get the words out. Mr. Cassel turned and escorted Jon inside, and the moment passed.

 

Recess ended soon after that, and Sansa made a beeline for the bathroom, where she burst into tears. She cried again when she got home, for she had found out just before she left school that Jon had gotten a detention for fighting with Theon. She barely ate any dinner, and her mother fussed over her so much that Sansa snapped at her and got sent to bed early. She fell asleep sobbing into her pillow.

 

For two days after that, Sansa was so consumed with guilt for having let Jon take the blame for both her actions and Theon’s that she was distracted to a fault. Arya had to yell at her twice on the morning of the second day before she took off her jacket, and she failed to notice until she was halfway to her English class that she had accidentally left the notebook she used for it back in the gym. She ran all the way back to pick it up, but on no sooner had she pushed open the door of the girls’ locker room than she heard a snort coming from the direction of the boys’ locker room. She pushed the door open a little farther and almost dropped her backpack.

 

Jon Snow stood slumped against the wall next to the boys’ locker room, crying.

 

Sansa froze in place, forgetting even to close the door. It took a few minutes, but Jon eventually wiped his face, picked up his backpack, and trudged off toward English class. It took another few minutes for Sansa to be able to move her feet in the same direction. When she finally headed off for class herself, her shoulders were slumped even lower than Jon’s had been. She felt like the worst person in the entire world, especially when she saw Theon Greyjoy chatting away with his popular friends while Jon Snow hovered over his desk in misery. She knew she should go to Principal Targaryen’s office and tell him the whole truth, but the old man scared her, and anyway, Jon had already served his detention. She would have to do something else to make up for her actions. But what?

 

“If you ever have trouble knowing what to say or do with someone, do for them what you would want them to do for you,” her parents often told her. Sansa bit her lip. What would she want Jon to do, if she were in his place and he in hers, to make show he was sorry and make her happy?

 

Jon wouldn’t have been such a coward in the first place, Sansa thought the next day as she shopped for school supplies with her mother. She was perusing the colored pencils when her eye caught on a box to her right. She moved closer to examine it and smiled. It was full of blue pencils, just like the ones Jon Snow always had tucked behind his ear.

 

Sansa smiled wanly. She had planned to spend her chore money on some pretty new purple pens for herself, but perhaps those could wait, at least until next week. It took her a few moments, but eventually she reached out and pulled the box of blue pencils off the hanger and walked over to put them in her mother’s cart.

 

The next day, the Stark children got to school earlier than usual. Jon Snow’s mother usually dropped him off much later, barely before the beginning of the first period, which made Sansa’s task much easier. Jon sat only two desks down from her, so it took very little effort for her to tilt open the top ever so slightly and drop the box of pencils inside without anyone noticing. She returned to her desk and chatted with Margaery Tyrell, whose desk sat immediately on her other side, until she saw Jon enter the room. She then made a show of retrieving her notebook from her backpack and smoothing out the pages while glancing as far toward Jon as she could, which was how she caught the frown that flitted across his face as he saw what must be the box of pencils. He did not remove them from his desk, but she could see his hand move slightly to his left. Certainly, thought Sansa, he must be prying open the piece of paper she had folded in half and taped to the box. Jon’s frown relaxed, and one corner of his mouth tilted upward. Sansa smiled with relief. He must have liked the words she had chosen so carefully the prior night that she had ruined at least ten pieces of paper crossing out the sentences she had written on them:

 

_You were very brave to help Bran Stark the way you did. I’m sorry to hear that you were treated so badly for it._

_I hope you like the pencils._

_– Your Secret Admirer_

 

The first period soon ended, and the students scrambled to pack and grab their backpacks before heading off to the science lab for the second period. Sansa was one of the last students out the door, which was why she noticed Jon Snow stopping in front of the electric pencil sharpener near the door. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a brand-new box of blue pencils, and proceeded to feed one into the sharpener. That done, he tucked it behind his ear and smiled that odd half-smile of his again before closing his backpack and heading out the door. Sansa grinned as she followed him out of the classroom.

 

The following week, Sansa came home from her errands with her mother, once again without the purple pens. Instead, she had bought a bag of the sour apple suckers she had seen Jon devouring at the end of many a lunch period. He almost caught her sneaking them into his desk on Monday morning, but Sansa was too quick. This time, both corners of his mouth curled upward when he opened his desk. Once again, Sansa saw his hand move as he opened her note.

 

_I forgot to tell you in my last note that you are kind too. And you are sweet, even sweeter than the suckers._

_Sorry again._

_– Your Secret Admirer_

 

On Tuesday morning, Jon got to class earlier than usual. Out of the corner of her eye, Sansa saw him retrieve something small from his backpack and press it against the side of his desk. He made a great show of visiting the pencil sharpener again, and once his back was turned, Sansa could not resist squinting at his desk. She saw a small piece of paper, folded so it was no bigger than one of the little Post-It notes Sansa’s mother liked to use, stuck to the side of his desk with a piece of tape. On it in bold capital letters was written: _TO MY S.A._

 

Sansa’s face reddened furiously. She stole a quick glance across the room to see if Jon was looking, which he was not, and proceeded to remove a pencil from her backpack and drop it on the floor. She stepped around the desk beside her and crouched next to Jon’s, where her pencil had landed, and whipped the note off of his desk with her right hand while retrieving the pencil with her left. Smoothing her hair out of her face, she returned to her desk, opened the lid, and pretended to reach for something while opening the note, which Jon had taped around the outer edges. The message inside consisted of only two words, but they made Sansa beam.

 

_THANK YOU._


End file.
